Regulatory compliance and its impact on financial as well as brand-image costs continues to grow as a top-level executive concern for most manufacturing companies around the world. Analysts at AMR Research report that U.S. companies alone planned to spend $80 billion between 2005 and 2009ⁱ to ensure that they comply with an extensive range of regulatory requirements - and a significant portion of that will be spent on technology and people to apply it.

Compliance is one of the eight key Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) business initiatives that I have been discussing in this column over the last few months. Since compliance requires accountability throughout the whole product lifecycle – from early product development to maintenance, to obsolescence and even to end-of-life processes that need to be documented, PLM provides an ideal framework for meeting compliance demands.